大象传媒

I was fourteen years old when war broke out, and at that time I was attending Accrington Grammar School. Instead of our usual School Camp in the Dales, some of us volunteered to go potato lifting and pea picking. Our first destination was near Huyton-with-Roby on the outskirts of Liverpool, but because of bombing we were moved after a day or so to Latham Hall, near Ormskirk. I did this for three years, every summer. At that time, we had to share our school with the De La Salle College from near Manchester. We started and finished early whilst the other school took over in the afternoon.
I left school at sixteen years of age to work as a junior chemist, but volunteered to join the Navy in 1943.
In January 1944 I was recruited into the mines under the "Bevin Scheme". The government, realising that most miners were in the Forces and reluctant to return, found a manpower crisis causing a severe shortage of coal. I was trained at Askern Main Colliery near Doncaster and then went to Old Silkstone Mine at Dodworth, near Barnsley. The Yorkshire folks made me very welcome. Later, I moved to Bank Hall Colliery at Burnley, and one night, whilst I was tending an engine, my lamp, which I had suspended on roof trusses, shook and shuddered. I thought that there must have been a heavy roof fall, but it transpired, that Lancashire had suffered a minor earthquake!
Towards the end of 1946, I was called to the manger's office to be told that I need not come back and that I could return to 'civilian' life.
To this day, I have still not received my discharge papers. We got no recognition whatsoever for what we had done, no "demob suit" no re-instatement rights and no postwar further education training grants. I took this matter up with the local M.P. Mr. Walter Scott-Elliott - a Scottish Laird - but to no avail.

Fortunately, out of about 48,000 Bevin Boys recruited, only about six lost their lives, but I left the miners considerably richer in the knowledge of human nature, how men worked hard under hazardous conditions - and with a greatly expanded vocabulary!

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